'Apex' review: Taron Egerton, Charlize Theron shine as predator and his prey

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The Netflix action movie "Apex" opens with Sasha (Charlize Theron) sticking her head out of a tent hanging on the side of a Norwegian mountain, as she and her husband Tommy (Eric Bana) attempt a dangerous multiday climb.

It thus becomes immediately clear that this will be one of those movies about people who are so different from the rest of us that you've got to forget about logic and simply accept wherever the story goes.

For reasons best discovered by the viewer, five months after that climb Sasha finds herself solo in an Australian national park, on a dangerous whitewater kayaking trip, even after a park ranger shows her a wall of missing persons posters and advises her to rethink things.

She finds virtually no one else in the park except for Ben (Taron Egerton), who initially seems friendly enough but then reveals himself to actually be a sadistic killer who hunts people for sport.

The director Baltasar Kormákur knows his way around a survival picture, with past credits including "Adrift," in which Shailene Woodley played one half of a couple marooned on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, and "Everest," the story of the 1996 Mount Everest expedition in which a blizzard killed eight climbers.

MY SAY This is one of those movies that really should be seen on a big screen in a packed theater, at the height of the summer season, with a bag of popcorn in hand. The realities of the business in 2026 mean that isn't really possible, unless you want to go all the way to the Netflix-operated Paris Theater in Manhattan, where "Apex" is currently playing.

"Apex" is built around soaring shots of vast landscapes, around scenes in which Sasha grapples with harrowing climbs and intense rapids, and others in which she flees through the trees as Ben chases her. Kormákur knows that the real foe in the picture is nature itself and he never misses a chance to show just how insignificant it can make everything else seem.

While the impact of this gets diluted a bit on the small screen, the epic visuals still resonate.

The story itself amounts to a basic, run-of-the-mill two-hander in which the characters mostly just do whatever the screenplay needs them to do for the action to be sustained. Theron and Egerton bring a lot more thought and feeling to the picture than it probably required. Egerton in particular seems to be having a great time shrieking and bellowing and doing whatever he needs to do to seem as crazy as possible.

"Apex" isn't destined for classic status. But it offers plenty of small rewards and more than enough reason to put down the phone and get caught up in an old-fashioned cinematic story.

BOTTOM LINE A fine action movie, made by people who know what they're doing.